Here is an example for who are all going to start learning Kotlin programming language to develop Android application.

First check this example APK to understand basic steps easily. I enjoyed a lot while doing this tutorial, If your Java developer you can play with this. Happy Coding!

Kotlin is very lightweight, its run-time library is under 400K minus the ProGuard minification. Also, installation is very simple. All you have to do is browse the plugin repository and get the official Kotlin plugin. You also had to install Kotlin Android Extensions as well, required for Android of course, but not until recently it has been merged with the Kotlin plugin and is now obsolete.

Settings > Plugins > Browse Repositories > Search Kotlin and install

To configure Kotlin in your project, convert any source file to Kotlin first.

Android UI With Anko

Anko is a library made in Kotlin that is a great utility for Android development. It consists of DSL wrappers and other nice extensions that make development easier. The prime value of Anko is that it allows you to embed UI layouts inside your source code, which makes it type-safe and allows programmatic transformation.

One thing to be noted here, the Anko base library, i.e., the anko-sdk* lib, you should add on the basis of your minimum SDK version and the rest of the other dependencies, you add on the basis of the Support Library that you wish to extend with Anko. For instance, add anko-design for design, which is from the Support Library.

Example

SplashScreenActivity.kt

Splash screen is one of the friend for android developers will see most of the times this screen while developing interesting concepts. Here you can see how Splashscreen code looks interms of Kotlin.

Conclusion

Kotlin is overall a great language. It is much less verbose than Java, and has an excellent standard library that removes the need to use a lot of the libraries that make Java life bearable. Converting an app from Java to Kotlin is made much easier thanks to automated syntax conversion, and the result is almost always an improvement. If you’re an Android developer, you owe it to yourself to give it a try.

Contact

Prabhakar Thota

License

Copyright 2017 MyInnos
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
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